Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s--Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen

E-book $7.00 to $38.00About E-booksISBN: 9780226401799
Published
March 2009

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men—upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, whose popular works culminate and assail this tradition, Claudia L. Johnson examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions.

Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender, and feeling in the fiction of this period, Johnson provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work—grotesqueness, strain, and excess—as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict. She maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."

Foreword by Catharine R. StimpsonAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: The Age of Chivalry and the Crisis of GenderPt. 1: Mary Wollstonecraft1: The Distinction of the Sexes: The Vindications2: Embodying the Sentiments: Mary and The Wrongs of WomanPt. 2: Ann Radcliffe3: Less than Man and More than Woman: The Romance of the Forest4: The Sex of Suffering: The Mysteries of Udolpho5: Losing the Mother in the Judge: The ItalianPt. 3: Frances Burney6: Statues, Idiots, Automatons: Camilla7: Vindicating the Wrongs of Woman: The WandererAfterword: Jane Austen "Not at all what a man should be!": Remaking English Manhood in EmmaNotesIndex